Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.
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There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.
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There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.
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The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.
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I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.
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The father's life is surrounded by mysterious prestige: the hours he spends in the home, the room where he works, the objects around him, his occupations, his habits, have a sacred character. It is he who feeds the family, is the one in charge and the head. Usually he works outside the home, and it is through him that the household communicates with the rest of the world: he is the embodiment of this adventurous, immense, difficult, and marvelous world; he is transcendence, he is God.
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It is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities.
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There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.
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Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
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A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?
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Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
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All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn´t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you´re closed up tight. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.
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Live with no time-out.
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Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.
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Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.
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Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it.
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The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.
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To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.
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Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."
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Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being.
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I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.
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The writer can't stop her unconscious from showing up, that's certain.
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To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try.
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The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole.